


Dance of Hours

by cognomen



Series: small god of words [4]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Cheating, Cuckolding, Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oral Sex, Robbery, Semi-Public Sex, main pairing is consensual - Freeform, trick roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:06:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4234890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Pazzi has been handed every messy case since the Questura had created the first mess in taking the il Mostro case forward against an innocent for the chance of resolution. This was a mess with no satisfactory resolution.</i> </p><p>-</p><p>A 5 times/1 time series in the Small God of Words universe. 5 times their chance or designed meetings ended in sex, and one time it didn't. Takes place over the course of the years of their relationship and may or may not be in any kind of chronological order, that's for you to decide.  These will probably range in content!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Adagietto

It's not raining hard enough to wash away blood or evidence - not that there will be much evidence. He had seen the video. A woman in a fine dress - not _too_ fine, but obviously the nicest she owned - had walked without hesitation off of the train platform and in front of the oncoming train. Eyes ahead, chin lifted.

Pazzi has been handed every messy case since the Questura had created the first mess in taking the il Mostro case forward against an innocent for the chance of resolution. This was a mess with no satisfactory resolution. A spectacle of a suicide. He does not need to be here - for all the other inspectors do not respect Pazzi's leadership, he has faith in them. He must, however, also appear - which leads them to hate him for hovering over their work. The hounding press at his heels is eager - when they can bother remembering Pazzi at all - to remember him as uncaring and inattentive.

There was nothing here for him to do, aside from look at splashes of blood, shreds of fine dress. He had bought one for his wife in just this color, once, promising that for the next year she would have one bespoke. It had never come to pass.

Pazzi's phone jumps in his pocket - he is only barely used to the device. It had once been a necessity, then a point of pride that Pazzi could be reached at all hours. Now it rarely rings- and only to summon him along to the next unwanted job. Whatever it was that other inspectors had passed over.

"Rinaldo," the voice curls around his name in a familiar and unexpectedly sheepish tone, strange from Anthony.

"This is Chief Inspector Pazzi," he answers - his spoken English attracts a rolling eye, a few glances from his silent and grim-faced subordinates. It will bring speculation - pleasure during work hours. They will be right, of course. Pazzi lifts himself back onto the train platform and looks for someplace private.

"Finally," Anthony says, the phone channeling his soft breath against Pazzi's ear in a vibration he can feel. "I've been trying to reach you for an hour."

"This is my private phone," Pazzi answers shortly. It is an annoyance and a relief to hear Anthony's voice, even unexpectedly.

"And I need a private favor," Anthony says, lowering his voice to a husky temptation, "from someone of your expertise."

The flattery rouses an old, sleepy warning bell. In the five years of their acquaintance his trust for Anthony has grown some, but Pazzi is still cautious.

"Meet me at my place then. This evening?" Pazzi asks. "I'm working a case."

"I need you to come to me," Anthony's tone changes, and Pazzi reads a bare edge of panic that reaches into his own belly and coils over like a snake. "I need you now, please."

Though he tries to pass it off as flirtatiousness, there is something deeper. This is not a need of his hands, his mouth, his cock - but a _need_ , specifically, for Pazzi. They have never admitted as much between them before. They did not _need_ each other, they were simply familiar and convenient.

"Where are you?"

"The Hilton Metropole," Anthony says.

Business hotel. Upscale, but outside of the city proper. Close to the airport. And - Pazzi knew - a target for a particular type of con. Not usually on Anthony's particular type of person.

"It will take me twenty-five minutes," Pazzi says, already heading for his car. 

"If it absolutely _has_ to," Anthony laments. 

Pazzi takes his room number down onto his pad of field notes, and tears the page out so no one finds it later. He realizes, as he makes illegal use of his siren, that he is in this far more deeply than he ever intended. Perhaps, an excuse to leave the scene before he was forced to get his hands dirty or place innumerable evidence markers. This does not excuse the urgency woken by the single word 'please'.

He takes his time to be casual with the concierge, to reassure him even as he shows his badge that Pazzi's business isn't serious, even with the phone jumping urgently in his back pocket again. He leans on the counter and waits patiently for the concierge to activate a new keycard, and hopes that Anthony had been right about the room number.

Pazzi does not knock - he isn't sure whether to anticipate a trap or surprise. He doesn't know whether or not he likes the thought of either. The halls are the same on every floor, a familiar hotel layout that Pazzi has learned better than he cares to.

The card glides through the lock, and the door yields to Pazzi's touch, revealing the sort of hotel room they don't usually share together - extravagant. It's not quite a wreck - his eyes pick out the suspicious lump of clothing scattered and left on the floor at the foot of the bed. Not too much for one person. 

"Anthony?"

A rattling sound, then bed springs - not a creak, just a quiet shift.

"Close the door, please."

Pazzi obliges, and trips the bolt and the chain, securing them inside from intruders. The short hallway blocks his view of the bed and old memories tug at him. Once, he had come to this very hotel to find an unconscious man who had cut his wrists- not dead yet. Pazzi had held his hand while the paramedics came. They had not come in time. In other hotels, crime scenes on beds and in bathrooms.

Rounding the corner, this sight is far less macabre - Anthony is sprawled naked on the crumpled and disrupted pile of sheets. Briefly, Pazzi is concerned - overwhelmingly. It is partially the picture he has expected, inclusive of the handcuffs, the lazy and overplayed smile that settles a hair past believable on Anthony's face in expressive lines. He has one hand free at least - to dial the police or Pazzi as he had - suggesting a kinder larcenist than Pazzi has encountered in the past.

"I hope you brought your keys," Anthony says.

Speaking, alert enough to be relatively upright. Pazzi covers his worry with a smile - this is the sort of trouble he should expect from this tomcat. He finds his handcuff keys in his pocket. There is a sweet perfume smell in the room, and Pazzi steps on an empty bottle of eyedrops as he draws up alongside the bed.

"A woman got the better of you," he observes, settling onto the edge of the bed, reaching out to have a better look into Anthony's eyes. They are dilated, past what Pazzi thinks would be necessary even in the dim hotel room. Anthony's lips are sticky and faintly blued when Pazzi runs his thumb over them.

"Well," Anthony says, rattling his handcuffs in demonstration of point. Pazzi takes his pulse instead - slow but not dangerous; the heartbeat is fast - curling his fingers into the intimate space below Anthony's chin. His skin is warm, and the fingernails of his free hand are pink.

"Did you have any seizures?" Pazzi asks. He has to lean over Anthony's mostly prone form to examine the handcuffs - they are real, no child's toy or novelty. He is aware of the slow push of Anthony's breath against his chest, and his _body_ is inappropriately aware of it, too.

"None that I remember," Anthony's voice against his skin, mouth moving against his collarbone.

Pazzi has not wanted a cigarette so badly as he suddenly does in some time. He works the lock open. Anthony reclaims his hand to rub his wrist. Pazzi puts the handcuffs into his pocket.

"Then you're lucky she had a good guess at your weight," Pazzi says, starting to get up. If Anthony is very lucky, she has only taken his cash. He does not think Anthony will want to press charges. 

Anthony catches his sleeve and pulls him back down with a breeze-soft pressure. It is the intent that keeps Pazzi more than any force. There is a certain manic vulnerability that manifests in Anthony's blue-bright eyes, now shining and fever dark even though his skin is only warm.

Pazzi closes his eyes to this; Anthony would not be protected. He could barely lower himself to accepting rescue. Pazzi's thudding heart is a conspiracy that will drive them apart and not bring them together, his awareness of the mortality of such deep rolling birds relevant to the ground.

No one knew why they'd tuck their wings and drop into spinning free fall - the thrill of it. Anthony's hands close on the lapels of Pazzi's coat, backwinging.

"You smell like diesel," he says, pulling them together.

"I've been at the train yard."

Anthony's mouth finds Pazzi's - stale alcohol and a faint bitterness on his lips- unbrushed teeth. Pazzi leans into it anyway, brushing Anthony's hands away when they make an attempt for his shirt buttons. Instead, Pazzi kisses him - his mouth, his slow pulse beneath his chin - worships with the slow progress of his lips the salt taste of Anthony's soiled skin and the running blood beneath.

Fingers work into Pazzi's hair and push him _down_ and he goes. There are thoughts in the back of Pazzi's mind about the sort of risk _this_ is, encouraged on him by an insistent grip and the upward arch of Anthony's hips. His open mouth on unwashed skin. A transferred risk, shared when Pazzi closes his lips and tongue over Anthony's hardening cock.

This is tender and slow, despite the nails raking over his scalp, despite how Anthony scratches furrows at the back of his neck and twists and arches beneath him with slow coiling pleasure. _He_ is clearly in a rush. Pazzi - in rescuing and risking - has earned the right to set the pace. To sip slow at pleasure and gentle until he can bring the trembling in Anthony's muscles to the surface.

Helpless, rolling shudders that shake through his thighs and turn Anthony's gasps into fluttering, halting expressions of _please_ and _more, yes_ and swears in two languages badly. Until the pleasure has turned cold-burn steady in Anthony's blood and is almost an agony to bring forth.

Spill over it does, though. Very little can last forever, and certainly the salt-bitter aftershocks that pulse slow over Pazzi's tongue taste sweeter than the tears of a near-miss might have. The drug lingers still in Anthony's system, the tail end of the high that Pazzi knows will have a bitter and biting low.

Anthony drifts in the current of haze and pleasure while Pazzi brushes his teeth with the toothbrush from Anthony's shaving kit; while he finds Anthony's wallet intact minus cash, but his clothes - even his underwear - cut and torn. 

He puts them into the hotel trash and tries to give Anthony the robe from the bathroom, plush and soft and comforting against skin.

"They'll make me pay for it," Anthony protests.

Pazzi supposes he has just written off all of his well-gotten or ill-gotten liquid assets and _he_ certainly cannot afford to cover for Anthony. He surrenders his long coat instead and endures the elevator ride down with the paling, shaking Anthony, trembling his way into the first steps of withdrawal. Bare ankles and bare calves and no socks in pricey loafers.

He is the one who feels vulnerable without its shelter as they find their way to his car.


	2. Portamento

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pazzi has begun to dread the seasonal parties. He has stayed - with the sinking suspicion it was intended to provide something on which to comment - on two or three lists. He could decline - he _should_ decline, rather than drag himself there and through the mud for the observers.

Pazzi has begun to dread the seasonal parties. He has stayed - with the sinking suspicion it was intended to provide something on which to comment - on two or three lists. He could decline - he _should_ decline, rather than drag himself there and through the mud for the observers. 

It stretches his wallet to rent a tuxedo, but his ancient tailored suit can no longer even pass for last-season fashionable and the pants have grown tight, the waistcoat reveals two inches of white shirt below because of the slight curve of his belly. So he crawls into the stark black tuxedo as if he is going to a wedding. It had been better, he thinks, when he could still talk Laura into making a truce and coming along.

Now she comes anyway, wearing a new ring that is not a match to the dull silver band on his finger. He does not abandon the artifice of marriage, the act of it. He wears the ring as defense against advances that would not come anyway. 

At the least, these parties allow for and encourage a certain level of intoxication. Pazzi goes to drink and to entertain his own company. He must keep up the appearance of involvement even if it makes the fine wine taste sour on his tongue.

"Don't you love watching the animals mingle?" the voice slides into Pazzi's spinning awareness - lately when he drinks too much, the world gets dimmer rather than brighter. The familiar voice seems to bring the colorful Christmas lights back to full illumination. He tries to quiet the thrill of pleasure he feels when he turns to see Anthony - a pleasant, well dressed specter.

"So long as you are not made to be the monkey," Pazzi allows, with a smile. He does not know why Anthony is here - though he can certainly venture a guess.

Anthony is dressed well, in that careless way that men of beauty can effortlessly indulge. Pazzi envies him only briefly - he would rather admire Anthony rather than be him. Disgrace was easier to bear on his heavy and sturdy body - like expectation. Anthony - and men like him - dodged the yoke.

"I didn't expect this would be your kind of party, _Ispettore_ ," Anthony continues - he's dazzling, his eyes picking up all the colored lights and seeming to reflect them back to Pazzi's blurred gaze. 

"It isn't," Pazzi admits, passing warm red wine over his tongue again to wet his mouth. "It is my type of drinking."

Anthony laughs. A voice raises over the crowd and calls him back. Anthony offers an apologetic glance, claiming two glasses of champagne. His smile is small as he glides away, "Can't keep the foremost expert on Italian Renaissance poets waiting."

The statement seems a lament. Pazzi sees Anthony drink from both glasses he had taken and surrender neither to the older man who has called him to heel like an errant dog. He is wearing a loud and ridiculous bowtie, with the air of a scholar who has fallen out of time, mustache cultivated in a way to suit a man twenty years younger.

His mouth, Pazzi thinks, is thus accented into something red and bulging, his lower lip like an inelegant, uncooked sausage. He wonders if people would look at him together with Anthony and think such unkind thoughts, weighing his worthiness as he was now doing.

He supposes that what they had would have to be public for that. Pazzi abandons wine for vodka, knowing the depths of this idea are terrible and dark. He does not much mind the punishment the morning would bring. His cab will come in an hour and fifteen minutes. Until then, the alcohol is free and the lights are bright and bleary. 

The discovery that somewhere along the way he has begun to hate the man who keeps Anthony trailing after - a leashed pet made to heel and smile and perform on command - means that Pazzi is paying too much attention. He sees, too, how quickly Anthony's drinks disappear. His own slow down. Pazzi stews too intently for distraction - even alcohol. As his pace slows his mind hones and sharpens.

Anthony catches him staring like a jealous lover - he _is_ , to be fair - and makes some muttered excuse. A brief whisper into the ear of his escort. The man is no longer paying Anthony any heed - engaged in the enthusiastic attention of his peers. Pazzi puts his glass aside, mouth suddenly feeling dry and hot. He wishes he had thought to bring gum for his blue stained teeth.

He is still sucking the lime slice ten minutes later - mouth so benumbed and soaked with pinot noir that he barely tastes it - when Anthony pushes him into a supply closet that he had no trouble finding, that he knew would be unlocked until he closed them in and locked the door. 

Pazzi thinks - until Anthony's mouth crushes against his own, spraying the back of his tongue with citrus and seeds - that Anthony intends to tell him off. The kiss is not the scold he expects. Anthony draws back sharply with a hiss. There is nothing demure, no shyness when he plunges two fingers into Pazzi's mouth - opening now for an apology - and pries the wedge free. He drops it into an empty mop bucket, chuckling.

"A _sourpuss_ ," he breathes, some pun that cannot penetrate the layers of translation required for Pazzi to get it quickly enough for comment before Anthony's tongue is penetrating Pazzi's mouth again, his arms winding around Pazzi's neck to pull him close. The taste of lime fades beneath champagne and the heat of Anthony's mouth. His awareness narrows to the trim body leaning into his arms, pulling wordless sweet sounds into the space between their mouths. 

"I knew it," Anthony says as they draw apart again, just enough space to breathe. His eyes are glassy too, his normally graceful enthusiasm - all part of his charm - has dulled and slowed.

Pazzi does not ask what he knew. He says instead, "You've had too much to drink."

"The fox calls my fur red," Anthony says, nonsensical lyrics to poetry Pazzi will never hear. He leans in again, this time to apply his tongue and teeth - sharp to pierce the haze - to the lobe of Pazzi's ear. It sends a thrill through him like an electric charge. "Shall we find out if it's too much?"

Anthony's request comes in the form of a steady downward pressure on Pazzi's shoulders. There is a strange look in his eyes, a demand to be appeased as a prince in fine silks might demand, but it covers over thinly a vulnerability beneath. A layer of sunstruck, dazzling snow concealing dangerous ice beneath. 

Pazzi would have gone to his knees anyway, but at this he drops to them - heavy and despite their protests at the impact with hard tiled floor. When he brushes his cheek against the tailored flies of Anthony's suit pants, feeling hot, hard flesh pushing at the fabric, he is glad he did not bet against Anthony's drunken endurance.

He pulls the zipper instead, leaving the button as a compromise to their potentially dangerous location. The door is locked, but a knocking hand would reveal them as guilty as easily as if they had left it unlocked. Better to leave easy composure in reach rather than abandon their guards utterly. Pazzi curls his fingers into the gap of fabric and finds nothing but skin beneath.

Pazzi chuckles. "Is it the feel?"

Anthony groans when Pazzi pulls his cock free and shakes his head. "You won't like the answer."

Pazzi's mind retains enough sharpness to connect a line from Anthony's overbearing escort to some notion of control over Anthony's body. The thought wakes angry like a large animal turning over, emerging from water in a twisting rage before subsiding and sinking back under. With great pleasure, Pazzi makes himself the instrument of Anthony's revenge and resistance. It takes two to make a cuckold of a third. 

He pulls Anthony's cock deep into his mouth with no preamble and enjoys the choked gasp this earns, the way it makes Anthony's nails go first slack then sharp against his scalp, holding on. Pazzi has never had the patience for technique in this, instead relying on broad strokes - the wide flat of his tongue against the head of Anthony's cock or beneath, and then pulling him in whole until his open mouth met the tops of his fingers. He gets no complaints, just soft groans that paint themselves against the walls echoing back against Pazzi in the shallow space.

"Were you really so jealous?" Anthony breathes.

Pazzi does not think he expects or wants an answer, does not think Anthony would like the truth. Neither of them probably _enjoy_ it - he hadn't ever intended to be submerged enough in this to find himself on his aging knees in a closet at a Christmas party. He doesn't think about it so much that he stops enjoying himself. For this instant, Anthony wants him jealous.

Like most emotions, it would be easier with a switch. Pazzi is more concerned at the moment with pushing buttons. Anthony begins to say something else, some impatient murmur that dissolves suddenly into a gasp when Pazzi pulls his cock deeper, unable to stand the sound of his words or the smugness of his voice without cracking a little. He stops it by sucking hard enough to steal words. To pull several stuttering exclamations of half formed filth out of Anthony as he cums.

Pazzi starts to draw back but a spare thought for his rented tux means he swallows against his preference, salt bitter. He coughs once at the taste when Anthony is finished and sags back against the wall behind him, breathless and glassy eyed.

Pazzi gathers his knees under him from a kneel to a crouch and coughs, "Yes."

He works his tongue against the roof of his mouth until the taste fades. "I was jealous."

He unlocks the door and makes his cab only five minutes late. In the morning, he returns the tux blearily while still nursing his first coffee, and pays the extra fee for the scuffed and dusty knees without a word of protest.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -The lime slice is absolutely a last-ditch resort if you have a bad case of wine-mouth. (Too much red wine makes your whole mouth blue-purple). The acidity can hurt your teeth, but if you're desperate it should also neutralize the staining. 
> 
> -Anthony's escort in this is Dr. Fell, in the original flesh. He's something of a giant shit head in this universe so we don't mind trash talking him a little.


	3. O Monumento

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anthony appears - after the first time Pazzi had led him back for a meal and a chance to wash his clothes - intermittently at Pazzi's apartment. He lets himself in, and Pazzi does not change the locks in allowance for how much he enjoys the company and how little he owns that is worth stealing.

Anthony appears - after the first time Pazzi had led him back for a meal and a chance to wash his clothes - intermittently at Pazzi's apartment. He lets himself in, and Pazzi does not change the locks in allowance for how much he enjoys the company and how little he owns that is worth stealing.

Today, Anthony is dressed for the warm summer weather, his shirt light and brilliant, mostly unbuttoned as if he has only just stumbled out of bed.

"Where is your corkscrew?" he asks, calling down the short hall from the kitchen.

Tired as he is, Pazzi's spirits lift some, making an exhausted effort skyward when he sees he has not entered an empty and aching apartment. There is a crumpled copy of _La Nazione_ under his arm that someone had left pointedly on his desk. One of his former subordinates, feeling the need to flaunt Pazzi's disgrace, to remind him that his place now was to be cheerful in his menial tasks before the axe fell.

"Wherever you last left it, " Pazzi suggests. "It belongs in the drawer left of the sink, however."

He pauses to take off his shoes, to hang his battered gray coat on the worn brass hook. Anthony returns to the kitchen, the sound of rifling through drawers of cooking utensils. Pazzi is aware that this is the fifth time they've seen each other this way, that Anthony's voice coming from the depths of his apartment no longer startles Pazzi.

He locks the door behind himself and comes into the kitchen, reaching into his memories of the last visit. He recalls bad take out, a wine stain on the counter; they had started kissing before drinking that time. The corkscrew had gone into the basket of mail on the counter - bright steel against dull paper. Pazzi fishes it free from the stack of envelopes.

Then, slowly, with all the anticipation and intent of a masochist seeking punishment out, Pazzi surrenders the corkscrew to Anthony, saying, "This is getting to be a habit."

He sees the frown form - writing itself indelibly onto Anthony's handsome, full mouth, and Pazzi knows that having seen the expression it will lodge itself impenetrably into his visual memory. He will call it up in the depths of nights spent alone. He has broken the rule that exists between them. They don't speak about it, it has never been laid out. The dangerous, wavering line of 'if' left between them seemed to be the thread on which this - _whatever it was_ \- balanced, continuing.

Anthony applies the knife of the corkscrew to the foil anyway, making light of the situation. "Next time, I'll bring white wine."

Pazzi relaxes, a laugh startling out of him. He surrenders the expectations that perhaps Anthony would run from the kitchen full tilt, or show an angry sneer and throw a line about charity, when confronted. Instead, Anthony pulls the coil of green-gold foil free and discards it on the small kitchen table. 

_L'IDIOTA DI FIRENZE_ , the screaming 56 point font headline of _La Nazione_ is bisected and blocked as thus. Pazzi tries to let it fall out of his mind as quickly. He wonders if the reason for this visit is related to the unkind candid of Pazzi unflatteringly eating his lunch two weeks ago. He doubts it - the visits to this point have fallen always according to Anthony's unpredictable time table. Likely, it was just bad timing - or good, Pazzi allows, when Anthony passes him a sizeable glass of very expensive wine.

It is a new brand - a new conquest, Pazzi thinks. Another temporary stopgap between his failure to engage whatever it was he wanted with whoever it was he really wanted it with, and Pazzi; the undefined failsafe.

_Carefully_ undefined.

Pazzi drinks. Anthony drinks. The events of both their days recede behind them, and they come forward into the wine-warmed present. Pazzi settles into one of the two kitchen chairs, waiting. It is the sort of night where Anthony will take the lead - he has something to say, some _itch_ to scratch.

Pazzi is content to be the post on which he scratches and the board to which he sounds.

The window is open to the summer air, the sound of the city a hum below them, quiet and ongoing. No matter the small universe of life occurring above the streets, below, Florence breathed on in it's slow, wheezing way. 

"Is it really a habit?" Anthony challenges, settling over Pazzi's lap and refilling his glass. The seat of the chair impresses a painful line into the backs of Pazzi's thighs.

"Would it be so bad if it was?" Pazzi asks, looking away so that he does not see the results.

Anthony snorts, an ungraceful sound that conveys his disdain for the amount of punishment Pazzi is seeking. "You'll never know."

It's infuriating, playful instead of painful, and Pazzi lets his gaze slide toward Anthony slowly. There is humor in his expression, in the depths of his shining sea-glass eyes. Habit or no habit, he would be staying at least for tonight.

It is a bigger comfort than Pazzi expects. A feeling that for this night, for once, he is not alone in the world. Anthony leans in then, gathering his hands into Pazzi's crumpled lapels and crushing them, pulling their bodies together. The kiss is a tease of teeth and tongues, an artful distraction that pulls Pazzi's thoughts up from the depths. Then his hand - slender, clever fingers - squeezes Pazzi's cock through his pants and his mind plunges down again and twists.

"Did you _really_ ," Anthony asks against Pazzi's mouth as the inexpensive chair groans threatening beneath their eager rocking, "want me to leave?"

Pazzi makes a sound that he thinks qualifies as a negative.

"Then why are you so intent to drive me away?" Anthony breathes - wine sweet, purple breath against Pazzi's skin. Pazzi is looking at his mouth, knowing its many applications, how clever it is at each.

"There is a moron loose in Florence," Pazzi manages. He has to swallow twice, to brace himself back into the low back of the chair and work his knees wider for Anthony's grip.

Anthony laughs - a bright white flash of incisor and a soft happy shape with his mouth and the dark depths of it that makes Pazzi want a cigarette already.

He sprains his back to pin Anthony, lifting him laughing and gripping with his thin hands at Pazzi's broad shoulders onto the table to scatter his papers and crush the battered tabloid. He presses the words out of his mind by plying his grip on Anthony's willing flesh, with his mouth open over Anthony's beating heart, with his back screaming above his tailbone for him to stop. Pazzi does not.

When he claims Anthony's pants - too tight, too many tugs - he finds the condom and lubricant in Anthony's wallet, both in flat foil packs. He knows both cannot last long enough there to be unsafe. He's glad of it anyway - this was not a job for spit or olive oil, even if the city loved its tradition enough to keep repeating it.

Anthony is already loose but claws marks through Pazzi's shirt and gasps a stuttering pattern against Pazzi's ear as he stretches Anthony open, as he pushes his cock in to the encouraging staccato of voice against his ear, the tone a breathy jeer, a high-strung challenge - 

- _more, yes, is that all you-_

-and a tapering growl when it _isn't_ all. They make no attempt at technique or temperance, rushing onward until release is a sticky white pulse on Pazzi's second best shirt and a lingering electric charge in the nerves, white sparks behind Pazzi's eyelids and sobbing sighs of relief painted on his skin in Anthony's voice.

They leave the table filthy, share the half an hour of hot water his apartment can manage at a time. They share his tired bed, kicking off everything but the sheets in allowance for the heat. Pazzi's back throbs and aches, demanding to be held very still and straight, but he sleeps. In the morning he wakes - they are not pressed together, but Pazzi's out-flung arm presses the flesh of Anthony's shoulder, small contact through the night.

He is always the first to wake - his habits have made him a morning person if he allows for enough cups of espresso. He drags himself aching and limping from bed and into clean boxers and the kitchen.

Pazzi is an idiot for making allowances, for reaching out after things he cannot have except by loan. He is an idiot because _La Nazione_ calls him one. He is an idiot who wants back what fleeting glory he had won with cleverness and ambition, though he knows it is as hollow as the cloth dove with a rocket up it's ass at Easter rights. 

But he is a fool, too, who can nurse a habit. Who can feed it, in this limited way, and then let it go until it came back around to chase out the crushed paper and ink and ashes in his mouth.


	4. Mark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's better," Anthony drawls, pulling his words out long like the puffs of cigarette Pazzi is sucking into his lungs on the balcony. "If you give it to me."

"It's better," Anthony drawls, pulling his words out long like the puffs of cigarette Pazzi is sucking into his lungs on the balcony. "If you give it to me."

The discussion had started sometime earlier, at some point before alcohol had taken hold, and now wore off again ceding its grip as slowly as possible amidst their efforts to wear each other out. This time, Pazzi considers it, trying to comprehend the purpose in it.

"And if I give it to you," Pazzi finds the words to describe his aversion now at last, having pounded the block out of his body, having ground off the sharp, nervous edges of it with the reassurance of one last tangible thing if it panned out as he expects. "It will be a nail in a coffin somewhere."

He exhales a mouthful of smoking white in coils and twists. The night air carries sweat off of his bare shoulders. Florence is not sleeping, not this city of lovers, but its waking parts are inside now, together.

"Very morose prose," Anthony says. He refuses to rise from the wreck of Pazzi's bed - if hi consciously notices that the sheets are now three grades finer in Egyptian cotton, he hasn't said. But, he had rolled himself against and into them, sliding and twisting to feel the sleek pelt of of them between the old mattress and his skin. Now he sprawls, a Sheba amidst old pillows clad in new coats. 

The emperor's new bed set. 

Pazzi cannot find, even in his visual memory, the first change he had made in his life to better accommodate such evenings. He has lied to himself several times on the subject and each time comes smoother, easier.

"You have no trouble getting in already," Pazzi observes, stubbing out his cigarette. Sixteen in the tray leaves four in the pack. Enough for tonight.

"You see?" Anthony says. "Nothing will change save how long I labor outside your door."

Pazzi is pulling another cigarette when Anthony's arms close around his middle, when his breath ghosts over the back of Pazzi's neck. He misses the flint on his lighter.

"Imagine, _Ispettore_ , if I had that time to labor _inside_ instead," Anthony suggests instead, his hands make wide gestures over Pazzi's chest, down his belly - flatter now than when they had first met.

Half a dozen images realize themselves to Pazzi's minds eye, each increasingly ludicrous.

"I don't like surprises," Pazzi says.

"No," Anthony agrees, pressing his smile against the back of Pazzi's neck before he sinks his teeth in below the hairline. "You _love_ them."

Very specific surprises. He does not need to return to lewd equipment installed in his apartment, to a hoard of tribute stashed for later enjoyment - but he likes to come home to something less than empty. He allows that.

Pazzi only argues because he knows he should - because in permanently unlocking the door he feels that he is somehow closing another portal. It may be the right thing to do, to avoid seeming eager.

It may be the right thing to see the end of this thing between them. The right decision is never quite clear. Pazzi tells himself to go with the flow uncaringly, to try and resist, as long as possible, any critical thinking on the subject.

"I'll have a copy made," Pazzi folds at last - of course. He lights the cigarette, and nimble fingers try to snatch it from his moving hand, but for this Pazzi is too quick. He holds it to his own mouth and pulls deep, then offers it but only from his own hand, from his own work-rough fingers. Anthony obliges him, this time, lips soft in the curve and crease of Pazzi's first two fingers, his breath pushing smoke over Pazzi's knuckles when he exhales with a single cough. Intimate.

Somewhere, his father is turning in the family crypt, bones and dust.

"Should I fawn and sigh in my gratitude?" Anthony asks, tone low and suggesting he just _might_ , if Pazzi delivers his promise. He will.

Pazzi shakes his head - he demands no price now, and he knows that it is a dirty trick like a deficit in Anthony's awareness, but he needs to know, as always, that what they share is given freely. Like keys to locks and cigarettes and clean wine glasses to be used.

-


	5. Intermezzo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anthony stays - eating his food, sleeping in his bed, lounging beautifully on Pazzi's sad couch with papers scattered out to hide the scars and rings on his coffee table - for nearly a week. It is unprecedented, but not unwelcome. He has a key, after all, and in that gift is the implicit permission for this and many other things.

Anthony stays - eating his food, sleeping in his bed, lounging beautifully on Pazzi's sad couch with papers scattered out to hide the scars and rings on his coffee table - for nearly a week. It is unprecedented, but not unwelcome. He has a key, after all, and in that gift is the implicit permission for this and many other things.

Pazzi doesn't ask about it. Anthony doesn't offer comment. On the third day, a _hard_ day, Pazzi comes home wet with old blood and shedding his clothes as fast as he can. He trudges through the small living room without expecting to encounter another living being. But he stops, with his fingers hooked into and yanking at his tie, when he sees Anthony, papers in hand and pen against his mouth, eyes angled up to track Pazzi's progress. 

Something compact begins to unfold in Pazzi's chest. Anthony's blue eyes change slowly from unguarded curiosity to slow pleasure when Pazzi stops all his progress just to look at him. A smile curves the corners of his lips, through the lower remains trapped behind the cap of his pen. 

"Will you recite it on the corner?" Pazzi asks. Something is unthawing behind his heart, bringing life and motion back to his limbs. He finishes removing his tie and suit jacket but doesn't continue to his bedroom. 

"No," Anthony purrs. "This is for marks."

Pazzi offers no judgment on the notion of Anthony's scholarly studies - that they seemed secondary to his other pursuits did not mean they were less important. Before this week, he could perceive Anthony's life only in sections of several hours at a time.

"When is it due?" Pazzi asks, carefully. Anthony will vanish before it is. Perhaps just before, but it will put a finity on this section of his life, perhaps help Pazzi to fold down his own pleasure at seeing Anthony every day, despite the certainty that each would be the last.

"Friday," Anthony admits, turning his attention back down to his page, to the heavy tomes in his lap.

Pazzi drops his tie, coat, and shirt-sleeves carelessly in an armchair and approaches the work spread on the table - pages of notes in Anthony's messy, expansive handwriting, photocopies of various articles in several languages, printed and stapled copies of poems.

"Petrarch? Pazzi asks, turning one of the pages around with his fingertips to have a better look at it - an article from a literary magazine titled _The Father of Humanism_.

"Francesco Petrarca," Anthony agrees, eyes on his work but with an intensity of expression that means Pazzi's interest flatters and pleases him. "Part of Bembo's model for the modern Italian language."

"Why not Dante?" Pazzi asks.

The look that answers him is dark, wicked humor with a sharp point beneath. "You can't present a fish with a report about swimming."

"I thought you were writing poetry," Pazzi says.

"A dissertation," Anthony corrects.

Pieces align themselves in Pazzi's mind. A night - a holiday night. A party, a series of hot and hurried touches in a cleaning closet. The smell of ammonia and the taste of wine and lime and then semen. 

Before that - these images are brighter in Pazzi's recall, but Pazzi reaches back into the dim. A man, beckoning and calling Anthony like a dog to tricks. Anthony introduced him as a foremost expert in Dante, and yet now must write about Petrarch instead because his teacher was also an expert.

"Will he let you wear underwear when you deliver your presentation?" Pazzi asks, earning a sharp glance at the seeming deeper knowledge. He forgets, sometimes, that he is dating - for a loose definition of the term - the former head of the Questura. Pazzi never forgets Anthony is a poet, though occasionally Pazzi lets his thrill-seeking slip from his mind.

"You remember that?" Anthony asks, chagrined. 

"Mm. If you're dating the man," Pazzi continues, keeping his tone light - he does not intend a return to jealousy, not here in his own apartment. "Does it really matter what you write?"

Anthony slides his gaze over Pazzi's form, dressed down to slacks and undershirt and his hands in his pockets. Watching Anthony just as intently. For a moment they are silent together, baiting each other. 

"It matters," Anthony folds first. "He's enough of a bastard that he'll expect a real dissertation."

"I'll order dinner," Pazzi concedes.

"You smell like a morgue," Anthony says, an absent observation that he has restrained for some time.

" _You_ order dinner, then," Pazzi says. He leaves his wallet - his cards are not worth stealing, and the cash is enough to feed them frugally.

In the shower, weight seems to wash off his shoulders. The day and various indignities of it rinse clear under the raking claws of scalding water and the soap he works through his hair - always where the worst of the decomp smell lingered. He feels lighter by years to step out of the shower, to fold himself into an old bathrobe and find Anthony still in his living room. 

The phone lays at hand, money tucked beneath for when the delivery arrives. Anthony is folded up along the length of the couch, caught unaware. There is a big, heavy book open against his raised knees, and a brilliant blue highlighter in his hand, pressed pensively, tantalizingly against his lips and just into his mouth as he reads. This shocking blue contrasted with his skin calls out the highlights in the storm blue of his eyes, picking a bright glow into them. A siren call.

Pazzi wants to push the book from Anthony's lap and drag them both into the worst kind of distraction but he doesn't. Perhaps, it's only the echoes of how they usually indulge when they both share this space calling out to him. He sets the desire aside for now.

Instead, he goes into the kitchen, tidies dishes, pulls the cork on a bottle of wine that's no match for the vintage Anthony brought with him, now finished and the bottle waiting in the bag with glass recycling. They are, for these moments, transitioning past allowance to compromise.

This is comfort. Pazzi pours, and in exchange for being brought wine, Anthony answers the door and retrieves the food to spare Pazzi having to do it in his robe. This is easy. Pazzi claims a space between Anthony and the arm of the couch, letting him work while Pazzi watches, with only half an interest, the evening news. The discovered body does not rate mention around a variety of scandals and pieces designed to alternately terrify and pacify the public.

"Watching for something?" Anthony asks.

"Vampires," Pazzi says, disgusted. He glances over Anthony's shoulder to see his work. the square blocks of paragraphs, interspersed with crossed-out sections or highlighted words - strengths and weaknesses - have been replaced, overlaid with a fresh sheet on which his expansive drawl details lines of poetry. Pazzi makes out words like _deep_ and _electric_ and _sweat_ , and begins to look more intently.

Anthony sets the verse aside when he becomes aware of Pazzi's attention. "It's unfinished."

"It's filthy," Pazzi observes, sliding his hands over Anthony's shoulders, over his chest as Anthony stretches out of his immobility and back into lithe activity. Pazzi feels his body stretch and twist; contained possibility gloved in a _very_ attractive package. 

"It's poetry..." Pazzi pulls the end of the word out long, heaving himself over and into Pazzi's willing lap. "The best place for filth. Americans have made an art form of it."

Pazzi makes a dismissive sound at the notion of 'Americans' and 'art' in the same sentence, and Anthony shifts again, pushing him down into the couch cushions. Pushing his robe open.

"Have you never heard a limerick?" Anthony asks.

The word is unfamiliar. "Is there a translation?"

"Nonsense," Anthony says sitting up, "un breve componimento in poesia."

"A little poem," Pazzi agrees, reaching up to undo the buttons on Anthony's expensive shirt with blunt, sober, careful fingers. They are both coherent enough to take their time. "About dirty subjects."

"Exactly so," Anthony says. He sheds his shirt when it is unbuttoned, letting it slide from his shoulders like a snake wriggling from an old, too-tight skin and stands briefly to see to his own pants. He pulls what they will need from his wallet.

Swinging a leg over Pazzi, he settles naked over Pazzi's bare hips, pushing his fingers in trails through his steel colored chest hair. Appreciative.

"So what you're writing is a limerick?" Pazzi asks, pressing his fingers into Anthony's hips, over his thighs.

Anthony passes him one packet, working with the other, methodical. This will only be the beginning, Pazzi thinks. Quick and hard to take the edge off before he grows more exacting, before he demands his hours of worship and foreplay. Pazzi stretches the condom over his cock and wonders at exactly what point he will be too old for such a young lover.

"It isn't a limerick," Anthony tells him, moving, pushing his knees as wide as the couch will allow. "I was just suggesting the commonality of dirty poetry."

"In English," Pazzi temporizes. 

Anthony digs his nails into Pazzi's chest for the distinction - for traction as much as revenge for the implication. 

"Don't try to pretend there are no dirty rhymes in Italian," he hisses, pushing back, grip firm and guiding on Pazzi's cock.

"I have no comparison," Pazzi grunts. Nails turn sharper still on his skin then ease as Anthony takes him all the way, and the conquest relaxes through him then, fulfilled. He traces absent shapes through Pazzi's chest hair, panting.

"There once was a man from Newcastle," he begins, inexplicably. Simply launching into demonstration mid-coitus with no preamble, "who had _the biggest_ dick up my asshole."

Laughter ruins Pazzi for a few minutes, as Anthony scolds and moves over him, making threats that he better not _dare_ cum before Anthony did.

It is the first poetry he's composed for Pazzi that he has also performed - likely, also, to be the last. 

-


	6. Finale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their last meeting takes even Pazzi - calm, expectant, predictive Pazzi - by surprise. this is not the casual invasion of his life that he has grown to welcome; this is not the tame sort of bewilderment that Anthony usually brought to his life.

Their last meeting takes even Pazzi - calm, expectant, predictive Pazzi - by surprise. this is not the casual invasion of his life that he has grown to welcome; this is not the tame sort of bewilderment that Anthony usually brought to his life.

For all those moments he has walked into his apartment and found Anthony in the kitchen - those he expected. This time, though it seems the same, he could not. He walks up the dark hall to his dark kitchen. Pazzi does not stay in his apartment long enough to bother often with the lights anymore.

His coat slithers off his shoulders and onto the floor. Lately, he leaves it there, recovers the crumpled gray trench coat in the morning on his way out. It never looks much worse for the wear in the mornings. 

Today there is a shape - a _figure_ in his kitchen. It rears up in the corners of his vision when he opens the steel door of his refrigerator, reaching in for a beer. Pazzi wheels, whipping around to see if il Mostro crawled up from the catacombs to bare his fangs. The door of the refrigerator swings open wide, spraying dim illumination out over the kitchen.

The figure is no monster; too slight, too humbled, too familiar. He stands just beyond the full reach of the light, an impossibility. On the tiles at his feet, a dark substance is dripping. The eyes are dark shadows only, holes in his face.

Pazzi steps back.

"What have you brought me?" it asks. The voice is hoarse. It doesn't move, just bleeds and looks at Pazzi with the voids in its head.

"The last gift I gave you is in an evidence locker in the Questura," Pazzi tells the ghost. He does not believe in hauntings. "I found some of your hair on it."

It hesitates, waiting. In death only would Anthony Dimmond be patient. Pazzi reaches into the fridge and retrieves the beer he had intended. Suddenly, he needs it. Suddenly, Pazzi wishes there was more than a quarter a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. 

"You went all the way to Palermo, and didn't bring me back anything?" The voice comes up warm and rough from Pazzi's memory. The image from a thousand.

"I brought back your body," Pazzi says, defeated. His own body feels very heavy. He twists the top off of his beer. "It wouldn't fit into a bag."

The clothes had. They were still-

"You didn't bring back all of it," Anthony whispers.

"Il Mostro kept some," Pazzi says. "We will never see it again. As Will Graham says - he does not leave evidence."

"My funeral won't be open casket."

Pazzi drinks until the bitterness is too much, until his body protests and the need for air overwhelms his desire to drink.

"It's unlikely," Pazzi says, hoarse, his mouth a bitter well, "that there will be a funeral."

"Then I suppose that makes me a hungry ghost," Anthony says. He stays out of the light.

Pazzi thinks the blood is coming from his head. He wants to run his fingers through those artful locks and soothe the damage. He wants to pull Anthony's forehead against his chest and feel breath against his collarbone. 

He closes the door of the refrigerator instead and plunges them into the dark. Anthony becomes a shadow. Pazzi wonders if he will have to hang garlic in his own window.

"Why did you wander so far?" Pazzi asks.

In the darkness, its eyes are only a shine, only a speck of reflected light. No answer comes. Pazzi finishes his beer and lights a cigarette, cupping the glow against himself so that he does not have to see the black blood. The ember bobs in space as he smokes.

"I always wandered," Anthony says.

Pazzi can think of a dozen times they stood in the kitchen at this distance. One time comes to mind, creeping in. It is a memory that belongs at a wake.

"Do you remember the last time you broke in?" Pazzi asks, and the words come with a rush of smoke. "After you had the key."

The ghost lets his voice fill the darkness and offers nothing but expectant silence for Pazzi to fill. He sits at the kitchen table, calling the memory up in his mind. It swims up quickly, facilitated by the current surroundings.

"After you turned in your dissertation," Pazzi recalls. His mind reconstructs the space - light, sound; the water running and running in the sink, covering - barely - gasps for air. Anthony had been folded on the floor, arms around his knees, abject misery. "When you came and cried. I thought..."

Pazzi hesitates. At the time, he'd settled down on the floor next to Anthony those weeks ago, wordless. They had not touched, that time. They shared space, shared misery and exile from the worlds they wanted. Pazzi had known in that moment that Dr. Fell had torn up Anthony as if he were the papers he presented. Ripped down his constellation from the sky and trod on it underfoot. _Purgatorio._

"I thought that was the worst I would ever see you," he concludes.

The holes in the darkness move over him. His voice is already rough with smoke, but Pazzi lights another. He thinks he'll light his way through the whole pack. The haze makes the ghost hard to see, as his eyes adjust to the dark.

"I wish to whatever god," he says, "whatever power there is, that it had been."

No answer.

"I'll miss you."

No answer - not to his prayers; no god can reverse the work of il Mostro and time - not to his words, though he knows the phantom's eyes are still on him.

"I already miss you."

"I'm right here," it says.

Indelibly marked into the walls and surfaces of his kitchen - the scratch on the floor beneath the table, the mark on the ceiling from an enthusiastic cork. The mis-matched carafe on his coffee pot, the first broken in a fit of exuberant - then broken-glass cautious - lovemaking.

"I suppose as much of you is here as there," Pazzi allows. Smoke stings his eyes and they water. He drops the spent filter on the floor and lights another.

"I swore vengeance, you know," Pazzi says. "On the man who had hurt you." 

"Valiant," it observes.

"Stupid," Pazzi corrects. "I can tell _you_ , but I would never have admitted it."

"You can still have your revenge," it says.

Pazzi snorts and chokes on it. He coughs, and reaches up with the hand unburdened by his cigarette, covers his eyes as the spasms pass. His hand grows wet on the palm.

"Both men are the same," it says.

Silence - or an absence of words. Soft sounds.

"Dr. Fell," it says, an old echo of an old voice, fading now. "Now not only the foremost expert on Dante, but a habitual painter of exotic canvases."

A pause.

"I still find his work droll," it says. "But I have a bias."

Pazzi puts the shaking cigarette to his mouth where it shudders its way through a long inhale. Match, il Mostro - and a body sculpted like a marble block. Not into a body shape. Match, a vanished professor and a new opening.

He looks up and there are three words in his mouth behind the cigarette smoke, but the kitchen is empty. The hungry ghost leaves a morsel and goes. 

Pazzi straightens - no blood on the kitchen tile, no eyes. His gaze searches the kitchen. It seems, maddeningly, to spin away from him.

Pazzi wakes alone on the kitchen floor in the light. In the other room, his alarm is screaming. Everything aches, and the world lurches and pounds around him. He is seated, his back pressed against the cabinets as it had been weeks before, when he and Anthony sat shoulder to shoulder in the solidarity of heartbreak.

He moves, and an empty bottle spills over and rolls away, and Pazzi presses himself, alone, to the cold tile floor until the heat of too much vodka transfers out of him, a cooling of the blood.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Thanks for reading! There will be one more piece for SGOW I think, and then I'll call it capped. Hope everyone enjoys the Finale tonight!


End file.
